


the force of water

by nirav



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-07
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-09-22 14:17:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9611123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirav/pseuds/nirav
Summary: Eighteen combined years of education, training, and capability crammed into her body and this is what her intellect, her hard work, her excellence has landed her.  A one-off espionage post for a shadowy assignment, sweating her ass off in a hotel in Colombia that’s increasingly looking like it’s going to be raided by the cantankerous, corrupt military she was tasked with overturning.[aka: the mr. and mrs. smith au nobody asked for]





	1. Chapter 1

_open up the headlamps, be poised to look for_   
_you're coming over, you've done your research_   
_it has the force of water and we've got a lot here_   
_the steps i take, back to you_   
_the steps i take, back to you_   
_i think we could save lives, if we don't spend them_   
_way undercover, i am not your love song_   
_your love song gone wrong_   
_the steps i take, back to you_

 

* * *

 

 

Alex has always liked warm weather.  She grew up on the water and on a surfboard, after all; heat meant being outside and in the water, where she’d always felt most comfortable.  Heat meant home.

This, though?  This sweltering ungodly sticky mess of humidity that is Puerto Colombia in the summer?  This is a travesty.

Four years at Stanford for undergrad.  Six at MIT for graduate school.  Two of tradecraft, tactical, and weapons training.  Six more of fieldwork, first with the NSA and then as a contractor.  Eighteen combined years of education, training, and capability crammed into her body and this is what her intellect, her hard work, her excellence has landed her.  A one-off espionage post for a shadowy assignment, sweating her ass off in a hotel in Colombia that’s increasingly looking like it’s going to be raided by the cantankerous, corrupt military she was tasked with overturning.

A _travesty_.

She peers over her shoulder, leaning more heavily on the bar and glancing over the top of her sunglasses towards the lobby.  There had been a small series of explosions outside, the coup she was monitoring coming along well enough by international politics measures, but now there’s a stream of annoyingly corrupt military folks pouring into the building looking for tourists traveling alone.  AKA those most likely to have set off the coup.  AKA Alex, who set off the coup.

A sergeant with rifle in hand throws questions at her in rapid Spanish.  He wears the chevrons on his shoulder and the $10,000 watch on his wrist like someone who’s been accepting payoffs from the local corrupt politicians Alex had taken out earlier that day, and she contemplates killing him just for being too incompetent to cover his tracks. Instead, she fumbles with her book, her sunglasses, mumbles out procrastinations in English to buy herself time to turn around and palm the knife holstered under her shirt, and—

“She’s with me,” sounds suddenly, and the sergeant pauses.  Behind him is a woman, small and striking and glaring at him with a hand propped on one cocked hip and jaw working as if she’s chewing on gum.  “Can you guys like give us a ride to the airport or something? It’s super hot and there aren’t any taxis and I don’t want to walk and I _really_ need to get back in time for my facial tomorrow—“

The soldiers stomp off, shoving past her, and Alex raises an eyebrow as the mystery woman winks, hooks a hand through her elbow, leads her to winding through the collections of soldiers and tourists until they can slip into an unoccupied suite.  Alex presses her ear against the door, listening carefully and looking the other woman up and down slowly.  It earns her a slow smile in return and an offered hand.

“I’m Lucy,” she whispers.

Alex takes her hand, holding and not shaking.  It’s steady and cool, somehow, despite the oppressive heat.  “Alex.”

Lucy squeezes her hand for a long moment—too long—and tilts her head towards the door to listen as well.  The bustle of the soldiers running through the hotel outside slows, eventually, fading with the sunlight as the heat breaks and night pulls around, finding Alex and Lucy sitting on the floor in the suite with a bottle of bad wine and a deck of cards.

 

* * *

 

Lucy is in tech.  The name of her company is unfamiliar, in that it hasn’t been one to cross Alex’s desk as a target or an asset, and she rattles off some elevator pitch or another that basically amounts to her being the IT equivalent of a samurai.

Alex is in bioengineering.  Or, specifically, her cover is a do-gooder with a trust fund and a PhD, flitting around the world with 3D printers to equip underprivileged children with prosthetics.  She likes her cover.  Most operatives are required to rotate their covers; she’s got enough clout with the bosses to build one and maintain it.  She likes her work, but she also likes her fake work.  It’s a win-win.

The fighting has moved on from the city streets outside their hotel, and Alex’s extraction is still on schedule for 18 hours later.  Her real job is done and she’d used up the last of the printing materials already that morning, so she has nothing to do but keep her hand wrapped securely around Lucy’s and let herself be led to the courtyard cantina and a mostly-full bottle of tequila.

Parts of the courtyard are crumbling, damage lingering from the fighting earlier, but music is playing and people are dancing and Alex finds a table with Lucy and the tequila.  Lucy bypasses the second chair and settles in Alex’s lap instead, offering her a shot of tequila and half a smile.  Alex has always been more of a whiskey girl, but she throws the shot back anyways because Lucy’s arms are curled loosely around her shoulders and, yes, the fighting could always swing back towards the hotel, but right now Alex’s focus narrows to the easy weight in her lap, the press of skin on her bare shoulders, the way Lucy’s eyes stay locked on Alex’s lips.

Lucy swallows her own shot, head tilted back and throat moving slowly, and Alex’s arms circle Lucy’s waist.  It earns her a raised eyebrow and Lucy leans closer, one hand finding the line of Alex’s jaw and tilting her head back for a kiss, lips moving over Alex’s, languid and slow and lingering.  They could have all the time in the world to spend in this courtyard, judging by how Lucy kisses.

Alex licks her lips as Lucy pulls back, hand still curled along her jaw.  “Was wondering if you’d ever get around to that.”

“You’re not funny,” Lucy says, dragging her fingernails down the back of Alex’s neck.  One side of her mouth turns up anyways and she slides off Alex’s lap.  “Dance?”

Alex is on her feet in short order, filling the shot glasses once more and following Lucy to the open concrete dancefloor.  Lucy’s hips move in a way Alex has seen before on other women but it’s different, slower, smoother, _more_.  She swallows the tequila and offers the other to Lucy; fingers slide over hers before Lucy throws the shot back and discards the glass.  Her fingers wrap into the front of Alex’s shirt and tug, pulling Alex in until her hands settle at Lucy’s waist, flexing under the material of her shirt and mapping the subtle lines of muscle in her back.

Lucy’s teeth flash in the firelight when she bites down on her lower lip, and she pushes closer.  Her hands slide along Alex’s bare shoulders, warm and sure against her skin.  Eighteen hours with this woman would hardly be a chore.

 

* * *

 

Alex wakes up alone.  Sunlight pushes in shallow angles across the room, reaching for the edges of the bed, and Alex yawns, squints, stretches across the empty mattress.  They had fallen asleep just before sunrise, Lucy wrapped around her, but now she’s sprawled across the bed alone.

She sighs and sits up, pushing a hand through her hair.  The clock reads 8:16 and she still has nearly twelve hours before extraction.  Maybe she can catch up on sleep.

The door opens and her hands tense automatically, even as her eyes stay neutral.  Being a naked and surprised woman is as good a defense as the gun she’d stowed in the underside of the bedframe.

It’s Lucy, and she has a tray of food.  Alex’s hands relax and she smiles at Lucy and the food and the fact that Lucy is very definitely wearing Alex’s shirt.

“Hey stranger,” Lucy says.  The suite they’d appropriated is large, and Alex watches, sleepy and relaxed, as Lucy makes her way across the room.

“Hey back.”

“I think room service ran away during the fighting,” Lucy says as she settles the tray on the mattress.  “But the kitchen is full of food.”  She leans over, hands braced on the mattress alongside Alex’s knees, and presses a slow kiss to the side of her mouth before claiming a cup of coffee from the tray and moving over to the window.  The morning sunlight is soft on her bare shoulders and highlights a pattern of lines scratched over her shoulder blades, and Alex licks her lips and flexes her fingers because she remembers, precisely, the noise Lucy had made and the way her spine had arched when Alex’s nails dug into her skin.

The coffee is too hot to drink, but Alex dumps milk into it and watches as the colors swirl around before she takes a sip anyways.

“It’s good,” she mumbles into the coffee.

“It better be.”  Lucy glances over her shoulder and smiles, quiet and confident in the soft sunlight.  “I had to milk a goat to get it.”

Alex snorts into the coffee, nearly spilling it all over herself.  Lucy is facing outside, her face hidden from Alex, but the smile is evident in her shoulders and the way she relaxes against the window frame.

“How’s it looking out there?”  Alex pulls at the sheet until she can wrap it around herself because she’s pretty sure her pants are somewhere over by the door, which is very, very far away.  It drags behind her as she shuffles over to the window, held up lazily by the hand not occupied with her coffee.

“Pretty low key, all things considered.”  Lucy leans against the wall next to the window, coffee cup traded for an orange.  She peels the orange blindly, focusing mostly on Alex, who blushes and clears her throat and looks down at her coffee for a moment before giving up on pretense and stepping over to Lucy’s side.  Lucy grins, wide and bright, for a split second before her features settle into an undeniably smug look and she wraps an arm around Alex’s waist.  “Hey.”

“Hey,” Alex says softly.  She abandons her coffee on the windowsill and kisses Lucy, tasting coffee and orange. The sunlight filters in, carrying the sounds of street vendors and taxis into the room with it, and Alex has twelve hours to make the best of.

 

* * *

 

There’s an hour to her extraction time and it’s going to take her 40 minutes to get to the location, and Alex dresses slowly.  Lucy is sprawled on the bed, absently peeling the skin off an orange with Alex’s knife and watching as Alex finds her clothes. The apple and pear she had already cut up, delighting in the smooth flip of Alex’s butterfly knife and the polished edge on the blade, sit in slices on the tray beside her.  

“Where you headed?”

“Home,” Alex says, gesturing vaguely with one hand.  She turns in a full circle, one boot on and the other nowhere to be seen.

“Looking for this?”  Lucy hangs over the side of the bed and grabs Alex’s boot by the shoelace, dangling it in the air.  “Where’s home?”  

“New York,” Alex says.  She reclaims the boot and sits at Lucy’s side to tie it.  Lucy pops an apple slice into Alex’s open mouth, grinning widely when Alex doesn’t hesitate and just starts chewing without breaking stride.

“Hm.”  Lucy pushes herself back up onto the bed and props her chin in her hand, her free hand finding the hem of Alex’s shirt and sliding under it and along the skin on Alex’s back.  She sucks absently on an orange slice, licking the citrus off her fingers.

“What?” Alex shivers under the touch, staring blatantly at Lucy’s fingers.

“Nothing,” Lucy says with a shrug and a smirk.  She shuffles back over the side of the bed and digs a wallet out of the pocket of her abandoned pants.  A business card appears in her hand and she leans over to kiss Alex, depositing the card in her jacket pocket as she does.  “If you’re interested in a repeat performance,” she says against Alex’s mouth before popping another apple slice into it.

Alex pulls the card out.  It carries Lucy’s name and a phone number and a Manhattan address, and Alex raises an eyebrow.

“I’ll give you a call, then,” she says.

“Looking forward to it.”  Lucy tugs at her jacket and pulls her around until she can kiss Alex again, licking indecently into her mouth and pulling back abruptly, leaving Alex breathing heavily and tasting the orange Lucy had been snacking on even more than the apple she’d eaten.  “To tide you over.”

Alex can still taste citrus on her tongue when she boards the extraction plane.


	2. Chapter 2

Lucy takes a boat out of Cartagena.  It’s not hers, precisely, but the drug dealer she handcuffs and deposits in front of the police station won’t be missing it anytime soon.  She’s got a rendezvous to make with a ship out at sea, and then a helicopter.

She makes it home just before sunrise, landing at the heliport on the west side and catching a taxi to Soho.  She walks straight to the shower.  There are scratches framing her spine that sting under the hot water.

It’s 6:30 and all she wants is to sleep, but she has a debrief to get to downtown.  She changes the SIM card in her phone as she waits in line at Starbucks and yawns through the download of text messages and voicemails.

There’s a text from an unfamiliar number.

_ I had a good time in Colombia _

She raises an eyebrow at her phone and cracks her neck and orders her coffee.  The timestamp reads just after six that morning.  She waits until she’s taken the subway downtown and is walking into the office before she texts back.

_ Let me buy you a drink sometime _ . _  Doesn’t have to be tequila. _

Her debrief takes an hour and she flops back into her chair at her desk with a yawn.  She has a write-up to finish and file and a set of upcoming assignments to sort through, but she props her chin in her hand and instead focuses on her phone.  A light blinks in the corner, and she regards it for long seconds before unlocking the phone.

_ I’m free on Friday _

Lucy smiles at her phone.  She cranes her head around and waves vaguely at the junior associate two desks away.

“I need date options for Friday.”

The younger woman blinks up at her—she has a name, Lucy is sure of it, but it’s too far out of reach at the moment, exhaustion slowing her down—and stammers out “For what assignment?”

Lucy cocks her head to one side and folds her arm over her chest.  

“Yes ma’am,” she squeaks out.  “First date or established relationship?”

“First.” Lucy glances down at her phone.  “Something low key.”

“Yes ma’am,” she says again.

An hour later, Lucy parses through the stack of options delivered to her desk until she settles on one.  She leans back in her chair, pressing her spine over the back of it and stretching.  The pressure pushes at the scratches on her back and she smiles.

_ Dinner and drinks?  I can pick you up at eight _

A response comes through ten minutes later with an address.

 

* * *

They spend Friday evening eating lobster rolls in Red Hook.  Lucy slings her legs across Alex’s lap in the half-empty subway car on the way there, staring unabashedly at Alex and the way she explains the bioengineering non-profit she manages.  They take a cab all the way back to Manhattan after getting drunk at a nearby brewery, and Alex’s hand traces a line up and down Lucy’s leg the whole cab ride back to her apartment.

Alex kisses Lucy in the cab, hands on her shoulders to keep her in the cab as she exits.

“Not on the first date, tiger,” Alex says with a too-wide, too-drunk grin and a wink, as if they hadn’t met over eighteen hours of athletic sex in a hotel suite in Colombia.  Lucy squints at her, licking at her lips, and then huffs out a sigh.  

“Does that mean there’ll be a second one?”

“Maybe,” Alex says.  She kisses Lucy again, bites down on her lip gently, and hops back out of reach.  “Next date is on me.”  She shuts Lucy’s door and leans down to smirk at Lucy through the window.  Lucy yanks her phone out of her pocket and fumbles out a text as the cab pulls away.  Alex is still standing on the sidewalk, watching the cab, when Lucy looks back after sending the text.

_ Tease _

 

* * *

Lucy’s phone beeps the next morning when she’s on the treadmill.

_ So if someone hypothetically wanted to take you on a date would you suggest fancy or casual? _

Lucy pauses, hopping off the belt and biting on her lip as she stares down at the text.  She starts to type out  _ I require fine wining and dining _ and then hesitates and deletes it because the sight of Alex in well-worn jeans at a lobster shack in Brooklyn, beer in one hand and Lucy’s hand in the other, has been swimming in the back of her mind since she got home last night.

_ Casual.  Hypothetically speaking _

She runs another mile before the response pings though. 

_ Do you have a car or should i rent one? _

 

* * *

The address Alex sent her is an office building.  Lucy knew this going into it, having scouted the place beforehand both in person and digitally.  It’s a block from the Waldorf, a towering early twentieth century monstrosity of a building, and the first 48 floors include a mix of lawyers, accountants, and investment firms.  The last six belong to Alex’s abundantly well-funded non-profit.

Lucy unlocks her phone and dials off of the text messages they’d been trading all week, craning her neck around to look up at the building through the car window as it rings.

“This is Alex.”

“Hey stranger,” Lucy says, smiling up at the building.

“Hey back,” Alex says, and Lucy’s smile grows a little wider.

“Feel like coming out of your castle and going on a date with me?”

“Three minutes,” Alex says, and the line goes dead.  Lucy raises and eyebrow and glances at her watch, one foot tapping on the car mat to the music.

Two minutes and 51 seconds go by and Alex appears in the doorway, eyes finding Lucy in her car immediately.  Lucy offers a lazy salute and Alex grins, wide and bright, and leans into the window, elbows resting on the door.

“Looking for a good time?”

“You could say that,” Lucy says, biting down on her lip.  Alex is wearing a v-neck t-shirt and isn’t trying at all to be subtle about the fact that Lucy can see straight down it.  Lucy reaches out and tugs at the collar of Alex’s leather jacket, skims her thumb along Alex’s collarbone.  “You know, if you want we could just skip the whole date thing.  I’m sure we could find a way to entertain ourselves at my place.”

“Nice try,” Alex says with a scoff.  “You said date, so I planned a date.”

“Yes ma’am,” Lucy says.  She leans over and presses a slow kiss to the corner of Alex’s mouth.  “Let’s rock and roll, then.  Where am I going?”

 

* * *

The carnival is overcrowded and understaffed and smells like burned corndogs and dirty children.  It’s exactly the kind of place Lucy would normally avoid unless she had to be there for work, but Alex leans into Lucy’s side when Lucy slides an arm around her waist and settles it in her back pocket, so Lucy rolls with it.  They drink cheap beer from plastic cups and almost get kicked out early on when Lucy throws a tater tot at Alex and it sparks a tot-throwing battle that carries them past at least four rides and a dozen carnival booths.

There’s a strongman game, and Lucy shells out the cash just to watch the lines of muscle in Alex’s arms flex when she picks up the hammer.  The next choice in activity falls to Alex, and she drags Lucy over to a shooting game.

“You ever shot a gun before?” Lucy raises an eyebrow as Alex hands over the cash to the man in the booth.

“Water gun,” Alex says with a shrug.  She’s holding it all wrong, the butt of the rifle pushed between her arm and side, and squeezes off half her shots.  They all miss, and Lucy laughs.

“May I?”  She picks up her own gun and hipchecks Alex out of the way, rattling off six shots and knocking down six targets.

Alex’s eyebrows lower and her jaw clenches.  “I want to go again.”

Lucy shrugs and hands more money over to the carnie.  “You heard the lady.”

Alex knocks down twelve targets in twelve shots, and Lucy blinks rapidly, not moving until a gigantic teddy bear is dropped into Alex’s arms.

“Well then,” she says as Alex pirouettes around with a flourish and drags Lucy towards the ferris wheel.  “Where did  _ that _ come from?”

“Beginner’s luck?” Alex says, shrugging casually.

“Uh huh,” Lucy drawls.

“Come on, take me on the ferris wheel.”  Alex grabs at Lucy’s wrist and pulls it back and around, pulling her arm around Alex’s waist.

“You just want to make out at the top, don’t you?”

“Well, we aren’t likely to find anywhere besides you car to fuck, so making out will have to do.”

Lucy stumbles over a discarded cotton candy bag and Alex laughs, loud and clear, and Lucy is pretty sure she’s in trouble.

They make out at the top of the ferris wheel, scandalizing a family of four and nearly dropping Alex’s hard-won teddy bear, and then Alex fucks her in the car anyways, sweaty and cramped and more effective than anyone has a right to be in the backseat of a car.  She smirks down at Lucy and licks at her fingers and that feeling, of trouble and a warmth that settles quietly behind her sternum, redoubles.  

Lucy takes Alex home with her and by the time she falls asleep, well into Sunday morning with Alex asleep on her shoulder, she’s certain she’s in trouble.

 

* * *

Alex doesn’t go home for the rest of the weekend.  She washes her clothes in Lucy’s apartment-- which, unsurprisingly, is enormous and well decorated and has a washer and dryer, like some kind of Manhattan mecca that probably cost millions-- and spends all of Sunday having acrobatic sex all over the apartment and the night in Lucy’s bed.  She makes breakfast for them on Monday morning and walks with Lucy to get coffee on the way to the subway, her arm easy and solid around Lucy’s shoulders and fingers tangled together. 

They part ways at the subway, Alex heading uptown while Lucy disappears down the stairs for the downtown trains.  Lucy waves and winks from across the platform, and Alex smiles and waves in return, stupid and enamored and happy, just before the downtown train arrives and blocks her view.

She strolls into the office twenty minutes later than normal and brushes past her secretary, her sister, her staff in lieu of locking herself in her office.  The computer boots up, slow as always under the weight of the company’s encryption programs, and she’s poured herself a cup of coffee and texted Lucy to confirm their dinner the following night—Alex will have to finish her current assignment in the morning instead of the evening, which is her preferred time; people are more wrapped up in their heads once the sun goes down and the city lights turn on--  by the time the databases are loaded.

It isn’t hard to find Lucy’s information.  There are plenty of tech firms in New York, but only a handful that would offer the salary necessary to pay for Lucy’s apartment in Soho, and even fewer still that operate downtown and have upper ranks consisting of anything but balding white men.  Lucy’s company is well protected, as one would expect from an IT security firm, but it’s easy enough to poke around elsewhere until she can set the databases running every iteration of who Lucy Lane could be.

 

* * *

“Okay, so,” Kara huffs out, straining her long arm for a handhold.  Alex is ten feet ahead of her and well on her way to winning this race up the cliff for once.  “Run this by me again.”

“Run what?” Alex says with a grunt.  She’s only got one handhold option and it’s six inches past her fingertips; she pauses, breathes, leaps.  Her fingers lock onto the ledge, and she grins.

“The part where you said you’re in love,” Kara yells.  The eyeroll in her sister’s voice is evident.

“I can’t hear you from all the way down there,” Alex calls back, glancing over her shoulder and sticking her tongue out.

“Don’t change the subject,” Kara says, grumbling.  She bends her legs and takes a flying leap, grabbing the handhold Alex had just abandoned and cutting the difference between them in half.

“Tall people,” Alex mutters.

“So this girl,” Kara says over her complaints.

“Lucy.”

“Lucy,” Kara says.  She gains another foot and reaches out, slapping at Alex’s heel playfully.  “You like her.”

“I really like her,” Alex says, focusing on her next move.  She’s got another five yards before she wins this time, and she pauses to calculate the best route.

“Like, you  _ really _ like her,” Kara says, pulling herself up with a sharp exhale.  Her head is even with Alex’s knee and Alex grumbles out a curse.  “Are you sure that getting involved with a civilian is a good idea?”

“She’s some kind of computer wizard.”  Alex glances to her right, notes the line Kara is aiming for, and scrambles over until she can claim it before Kara does.  “Travels constantly, almost as much as I do.  It’s as good a setup as I’m ever going to find.”

“You’ve only known her for like two months!”

“Yeah, well,” Alex grinds out, straining for the next handhold.  She’s almost at the top.  “I just know, okay?”

“Know what?”  Kara huffs out a sigh of frustration and glares as Alex hauls herself up over the cliff’s edge and rolls back over to smirk down at Kara.  “Cheater.”

“That she’s it.  For me.  She’s it.”

“This is going to go great,” Kara mutters.  “Give me a hand, cheater.”

 

* * *

“Say what now?”  James paces along the outside of the boxing ring, hands on his hips.

“I think I’m in love,” Lucy mumbles around her mouthpiece.  She ducks under the punches coming at her and drives up with a combination of bodyshots that pushes the trainer in the ropes.  It grants her a half second to grin at James before going back on the defensive.

“With who?” He half-yells, throwing his hands in the air.  “You’ve known her for like four seconds!”

“Yeah, but she’s perfect,” Lucy yells back, barely dancing away from the knee flying towards her ribs.

“You don’t know that.”

“Do too.”  Lucy lands an uppercut and dances back from the counter.

“Even if you do, you’re lying to her, you know.  She’ll figure that out.  Women always know.”

“She’s always traveling.  She manages some biotech nonprofit.”  A punch rockets past her block and lands on the padding over her jaw, and Lucy stumbles back into the ropes in front of James.  She lets her head fall back so she can grin up at him for a brief moment before her legs are swept out from under her and she slams down into the mat.  “I can make it work.”

“It’s a bad idea,” James says, petulant as always.  Lucy can’t see him from the headlock that has her face pressed into the mat, but she knows that he’s got his arms folded over his chest, the way he does that makes his shoulders look broader and biceps larger.

“I asked her to marry me,” Lucy says, on her back and barely blocking the barrage of punches coming at her face.

“You  _ what _ ?” he bellows.  “Dude, stop punching her, I think she’s concussed. She’s talking stupid.”

Lucy gets her knees up and her feet into the abdomen of her trainer and kicks, throwing him back.  She stands, woozy and dizzy, and grins at James again.  “I’m getting married.”

“You’re getting stupid, that’s what you’re getting,” he mutters.  The trainer drives his shoulder into Lucy’s stomach, lifting her off the ground and dropping her down into the mat.  “You deserve that.  You deserve all of that.”

 

* * *

They get married in Spain, in a private ceremony.  Only family is invited, save for James, who’s basically an obnoxious brother anyways; he stands up with Lucy as she waits for Alex.  They’d flipped a coin to see who would stand and who would walk down the aisle, and Lucy won, so she stands waiting for Alex to appear.

She turns a corner, her father on her arm, and Lucy sways in her spot.  Alex winks at her from twenty steps away and Lucy grins, broad and stupid and in love, as she waits.

Beside her, James rolls his eyes.

“You’re embarrassing,” he mutters.

“I’ll shoot you,” she whispers back without letting her smile slip.

 

* * *

Their honeymoon is two weeks in an outrageously expensive luxury cabin in Sweden, ostensibly for the excellent stargazing views and the ability to see the northern lights.  They only end up looking at the night sky or anything outside of the cabin once the whole time.

 

* * *

They buy a house, because that’s what married people do.  It’s enormous and suburban and has a two car garage for the two cars they now own for commuting into the city, because that’s what married people do.  It’s in a neighborhood where children ride their bikes in the streets and a homeowner’s association dictates the length of the grass and size of the hedges, because that’s what married people do.  

They’re married, and Alex has always hated every iteration of the suburbs she ever ventured into, but she smiles and kisses Lucy’s hand when they sign the mortgage for the house, when they buy the cars, when they hire moving companies to pack up both of their apartments, because she’s married now, and this is what married people do.

The day they move in, one of the neighbors brings them a loaf of banana bread.  She smiles, wide and bright and with way too many teeth, when Alex opens the door, and chatters away at her about neighborhood cookouts and her church’s softball league right up to the point where Lucy appears with the muscles in her arms straining appealingly under sweat and the weight of the box full of books she’s lugging.

“And what about your husband, what does he-- oh, hello!” the neighbor—Margaret—says.  “Who’s this?’

“This is Lucy,” Alex says, a real smile spreading across her lips for the first time since she’d opened the door.  She glides her hand along Lucy’s arm, bare and sticky with sweat from moving furniture all day.  “My wife.  Babe, this is Margaret.  She wanted to welcome us to the neighborhood.”

“Hi there,” Lucy says, leaning into Alex’s side and running with the game.  “So nice of you to come by and say hi, we’d  _ love _ to get to know the neighbors.”

“It’s a pleasure,” Margaret says, her tone as falsely bright as her teeth.  She shakes Lucy’s hand tentatively.  “Well, I’ll be going now, it looks like you have plenty to do.  Welcome!”

She scurries back down the sidewalk, and Lucy calls after her, “Come over anytime!  We’d love to have you!” before Alex shoves the door shut with her hip.  Lucy tugs on Alex’s jeans pocket and kisses her, short and heated, before picking up the box of books and dropping it in her hands.

“Stop taunting the churchgoing neighbors,” she says.  

Alex rolls her eyes and follows Lucy to the room they’d decided would be the library, only stumbling twice because she’s more focused on Lucy’s ass than her steps.  Lucy ignores the books once they’re in the library and muscles her up onto the desk, kneeling on the still-folded rug they’d moved in and mouth moving slow and easy against Alex, and they give up on unpacking for the day and order a pizza that they eat while sitting on the floor of the partially-unpacked living room.  They camp out on the floor in the bedroom, sleeping on the mattress on the floor, and Alex wakes up before sunrise with Lucy wrapped around her, heartbeat slow and steady against Alex’s back and slowly lulling her back to sleep.

Maybe the suburbs won’t be too terrible.


	3. Chapter 3

**YEAR ONE**

The suburbs are _terrible_.  Margaret and her husband, Phillip, decide that Alex and Lucy, by virtue of being young and queer, are interesting and have to become the diversity quotient at all neighborhood events.  Alex learns how to grill, and Lucy dusts off the golfing lessons she’d had for six months in high school so that she can go out and kick Phillip’s ass one Sunday a month at the course in Westchester.

Lucy contemplates, often and with great detail, how she could execute the Colemans without causing significant disruption to their lives.  The suburbs may be terrible, but they’ve been there for a year and the house feels like a home, finally, and Alex has converted the basement half into a lab for her work and half into storage for the sixteen surfboards she owns but never uses anymore, and things are good.

The suburbs are terrible, but for their first anniversary Alex surprises her with a trip to Puerto Colombia, at the same hotel and in the same suite, so Lucy shelves her considerations of homicide and enjoys living with her wife.

**YEAR TWO**

Their first fight—first _real_ fight, where Alex stormed out of the house and came home hours later to Lucy gone—happens a month after their second anniversary.  It starts with Alex getting careless and forgetting to put her wedding ring back on when she gets home one night and ends with Lucy sleeping at James’ house for a week.  By the time she comes home, they’ve both cooled off enough to kiss and make up, but the specter of the argument and everything that came up with it—dishonesty and insecurity and ongoing uncertainty—stays in the back of Alex’s mind.

It’s another month before she works up the nerve to touch Lucy, really touch her, with her hands and her lips and her tongue the way she always had before.  It’s another week after that before Lucy is ready to let her.

**YEAR THREE**

They celebrate their third anniversary at the restaurant Lucy proposed at.  It’s a calm affair, quiet, Alex’s suit and Lucy’s dress enough to fill the gaps in conversation that come up too often.  “ _I like your dress_ ” and “ _You should wear suits more often_ ” pour into the empty cracks that spread between mundane conversations about work and traffic and whether or not they should have the concrete in the driveway redone.

**YEAR FOURish**

Lucy spends three weeks on a business trip to San Francisco and comes home to a house that smells a little stale.  Alex returns from work an hour later and offers a perfunctory kiss on the cheek, as if it had only been a day, before disappearing into her lab to work on one of the 3D printers.  She has a trip to Pakistan coming up.

**YEAR FIVEish**

“Do you think we should try marriage counseling?”  Alex brings it up without preamble.  Lucy still has a toothbrush in her mouth and she almost chokes on the toothpaste, spitting it out into the sink and wiping at her mouth.

“What?”

Alex shrugs.  “Might be a good idea.”

“Counseling?”

“We’ve been home at the same time for three nights out of the last six weeks,” Alex says, squirting contact solution into the case and fumbling for her glasses.  “Maybe we should talk to someone.”

“Oh.”  Lucy rinses her toothbrush off and twists her hair up onto the top of her head.  “If you think so.”

“Okay,” Alex says.  “I’ll find someone.”

“Okay.”

 

* * *

The therapist is blonde and pretty and barely older than them.  Lucy raises an eyebrow at her from her spot at Alex’s side, arms folded neatly in front of her, and stares the woman down.  To her right, Alex leans an elbow on the arm of her chair and swallows a sigh.  Maybe it was just time to fake her death and move on.  She loves Lucy, but married life is-- well.  Not for her.

“So,” the therapist says.  She has a name-- Marie-- but all Lucy can see is  _ therapist _ and the six ways to kill her without even leaving her chair.  “Why don’t you tell me why you’re here?”

“We don’t  _ need _ to be here,” Lucy says, still staring Marie down.  Alex shifts in her chair and Lucy keeps her glare locked on Marie, who blinks passively back at her.  If Lucy includes the handgun in her purse then the murder options increase from six to sixteen.  “We just felt that it was prudent to take a step back and determine if there are any looming issues we may need to address in the future.”

“Well okay, then,” Marie says.  “Let’s get started.”

“Okay,” Lucy says.

“Okay,” Alex echoes.

Silence creeps between the three of them, and Lucy arches her eyebrow even higher.  Alex is back to being a statue in her chair.

“So,” Marie says.  “Maybe I’ll just start with some standard questions.”

Alex nods, short and sharp, and Lucy waves a hand lazily.  Marie doesn’t blink.

“How long have you been married?”

“Five years,’ Lucy says.

“Six,” Alex says, finally breaking her silence.  Lucy smiles, wide and fake, at Marie.

“Five or six years.”

Marie remains unfazed. “How often do you have sex?”

Lucy’s eyebrow drops level.  “What?”

“What?” Alex says at the same time.

“It’s not uncommon with lesbian couples--”

“We’re not lesbians,” Alex and Lucy say, automatic and simultaneous, the recitation as rote as everything else in their lives.

“I apologize,” Marie says.  “Regardless, it’s not--”

“Our sex life is fine,” Alex says sharply.  

“No dry spells?  No boredom?”

“No,” Lucy says, settling back into her glare at Marie.  “Could we perhaps focus on something more relevant?”

“Of course,” Marie says, still obnoxiously unfazed.  Lucy winds her fingers together and pushes them down into her lap, holding herself back from reaching for her gun.

 

* * *

The first three years they were married, Lucy only took last minute jobs during the day, always home to help with dinner by 6:30.  The last two (three?) years, though, she’s started taking more and more evening jobs, effortlessly fabricating server crises and technology concerns around Manhattan that keep her from home.

One lands in her email at 4:00 on a Friday and she accepts it without even looking beyond the words  _ Manhattan _ and  _ immediate _ .  Lucy sends one of the baby associates to make her a latte and starts reading up on the weapons dealer she has to kill.  She sets another-- her name is Sarah, maybe?-- to developing an alibi for her in case Alex asks.

Alex hasn’t asked about Lucy’s work emergencies in three years.  

 

* * *

“You going out?”  Alex doesn’t pause as she drops the question on her way through the bedroom.  She kisses Lucy on the cheek without breaking stride towards her closet, pulling her blazer off.  

“Some hedge firm or another is having a meltdown,” Lucy says, spraying perfume on her wrist.  

“We promised the Colemans.”

Lucy straightens her coat and tugs at the belt on it as she turns around.  Alex’s back is to her, blazer dropped on the vanity table and heels discarded on the floor halfway between them.  She glances in the mirror to catch Lucy’s eye.

“Eight o’clock,” Lucy says.  “I won’t be late.  You know these Wall Street firms, they think the world is ending when one hard drive overheats.”

Alex smiles at her in the mirror and turns her focus to taking her watch off.  “Can you pick up a bottle of wine on your way home?” 

“Sure thing,” Lucy says.  She kisses Alex on the cheek as she goes by and disappears out of the bedroom, long coat swishing around her legs and hiding the wholly suburb-inappropriate leather and fishnets under it.  Forty year old male arms dealers are too easy to handle.  She texts one of the firm minions to have a bottle of red waiting in her car when she’s done.

 

* * *

Alex waits ten minutes after Lucy’s car disappears down the street before hurrying downstairs to her lab.  It’s full of 3D printers and molds and prototypes, half in working order and half projects she’s working on for an upcoming trip to Bangladesh.  She flips a series of switches on the workbench and steps back, yawning, as the benches slide forward and up to reveal shelves of supplies.

She checks her watch and turns on one of the phones in the supply shelves.  Assuming traffic is cooperative, she can be back before Lucy and they can make it out to play happy neighbors with the Colemans.  She orders a car on the new phone and sheathes a series of knives in useful places, easy to reach and easy to hide.

 

* * *

The hotel is in Times Square.  Lucy can almost forgive arms dealing—up to a point, at least; people are allowed to make their own poor choices and other people are allowed to capitalize on them—but forcing her to go to the most obnoxious place in Manhattan is enough to warrant the death sentence she’s already on her way to deliver.

She strides into the hotel suite with her chin up, even if she’s still a foot shorter than half of the guards in four inch heels.  They search her, in some misguided attempt at security, before letting her in to wreak havoc.

 

* * *

Alex elbows her way up through the throngs of college students at the bar three blocks from NYU.  Pints of Guinness slosh around her and a poor interpretation of Celtic rock blares from the speakers, and she steals two tequila shots from a couple of frat boys with a wink and throws them back.  They stare at her, baseball caps askew and cheeks red from the alcohol, before throwing their fists in the air and yelling their approval.  She twiddles her fingers in a wave and saunters back through the crowd, shuffling towards the bathroom and then right past it, pulling a giggle out of her throat as she stumbles into the back room of the bar.

The three men at the poker table move for their guns, and she shuts the door behind her and whisper-shouts out an “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry!”

“Get out of here,” one of them snaps at her, hand still at the gun in his waistband; one of the others slaps the back of his head. 

“Sorry, love,” he says in what must be the best approximation he has of a charming voice.  “Don’t mean no harm.  You need anything?”

“I was looking for my friend, she met some  _ guy _ and disappeared,” Alex pouts.  She sways on her feet and slumps back against the door behind her.  “Have you seen her?”

“Can’t say that I have.”  He slaps his friend on the back of the head again, glaring at him until he rolls his eyes and settles his hands back on the table.  “But you can wait here for her, if you’d like.  We have room.”

“That’s Lucky’s spot!” the third man says sharply. 

“Lucky ain’t here,” the charmer says, turning his glare to the third guy before fixating on Alex with a smile.  “Come on over, sweetie, you can wait with us.”

“Oh, wow, thank you,” Alex says, shuffling over and flopping bonelessly down into the empty chair.  “Oh hey, are you guys playing poker?  I love poker!” 

“The buy in is a bit steep,” the first man says. 

“Oh, that’s okay!” Alex says cheerfully.  She yanks a wad of cash out of her purse.  “Daddy just transferred my spring break money to me!”

“Well then,” the third says.  “Welcome to the game, sweetheart.”

 

* * *

Lucy’s managed to get targets into cuffs faster than this before, technically, but it normally involves several guns.  Her arms dealer, though, is so ready to be tied up that he’s on his knees and has his hands behind his back before her coat even hits the ground. 

She slides the tip of the riding crop up along his spine, and he shivers.  He’s eager—too eager, really; it’s making this boring—and she glances at the clock and sighs.  At least she can finish this early and get back in time  to shower before the Colemans.

The guards outside are watching Jeopardy! and a daily double pops up.  Applause from the TV rises louder and she takes the opportunity to slide her hands up the dealer’s back, to his shoulders.  He shivers again, and she rolls her eyes and snaps his neck.

“You really should learn to play it cool,” she mumbles towards his ear before dropping his body and letting it fall to the floor.  She collects her coat and purse, tying the belt just as the guards realize something is wrong and start breaking through the door.

The titanium handles on her purse convert into a convenient anchor and she rappels down the side of the building, landing just as a taxi pulls up and sliding gracefully into the open door.

6:45. Plenty of time.

 

* * *

Alex has lost all of her spring break cash and her earrings—the sapphire ones Lucy gave her on her birthday the first year they were married—and charmed all three of the poker players when the door opens again.

“What the hell is this?”

“Oh  _ hi, _ ” Alex gushes over her shoulder.  “Are you Lucky?”

“Who the hell are you?” Lucky says, slamming the door behind her.

“Bit of bad luck, I think,” Alex says.  She hurls a knife backhanded across the room and it buries in his throat.  The poker players upend the table trying to grab her and she gets one in the stomach, one under the ribcage, and the last one swings a punch into her side.  It leaves him too close and she lands an uppercut of her own and slams a knife into his throat.

She steps daintily over the bodies and collects her earrings, popping them back into her ears.  The clock behind the table reads 7:01.  She’s got just enough time to get home and change.

 

* * *

Lucy is home when she gets there.

“Shit,” Alex mumbles, digging her rings out of her pocket and sliding them back onto her left hand.  She ducks into the bathroom by the kitchen and washes a smear of blood off of shoulder before heading upstairs.

“Hey, baby,” Lucy says from inside the bathroom.  “You went out?”

“Yeah, I shot a few games with Kara.” Alex yanks her bloody top off and crams it into the back of a drawer.  Her bra is miraculously free of blood, thank God.  “Meltdown saved?”

“Yep,” Lucy says over the water. 

“Did you get some wine?”

“It’s downstairs.  That Malbec you like.”

“Great,” Alex says.  “You about ready?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Great,” Alex says again.  She huffs out a deep breath and sets to digging through her suburban dinner party-appropriate clothes for something to wear.

 

* * *

An hour into the party at the Colemans, someone shoves a baby into Alex’s arms.  She’s held armed explosives with more comfort than an infant, and she gapes at the gurgling baby in his green onesie.  He gapes right back at her.

Beside her, Margaret cheerfully comments on Alex having a baby sometime soon, and Alex considers how bad it would be if she threw the baby at Margaret’s head.  Instead, she pastes a smile on her face and mumbles something noncommittal.  Across the room, Lucy chokes momentarily on a sip of wine when she catches sight of Alex holding the baby.  Phillip slaps at her back uselessly, but she just stares across the room at Alex, who stares past the baby’s bald head right back at Lucy.

 

* * *

“So,” Marie says.  “I have to say, I didn’t expect you to come back.”

Lucy focuses on her left hand, twisting her wedding band slowly around her finger.

“Especially not by yourself,” Marie continues. 

“Yes, well,” Lucy starts to say.  She falters for a moment.  “I can’t say I did, either.”

“So why did you?”

“I suppose I’m not sure where I stand at this point.”

“In what regard?”

Lucy reverses the twist on her ring, spinning it in the other direction.  She’s quiet for long moments, staring down at the way the office lights glint against the silver. 

“Regarding my marriage.”

“You’re not sure where you stand in your marriage?”

“I love my wife,” Lucy says, enunciating carefully.  “I do, very much.  All I want for her is for her to be happy.  But something about us just—doesn’t seem to fit anymore.”

 

* * *

“It’s like we’re complete strangers,” Alex says, pacing back and forth in Marie’s office.  Marie doesn’t move, watching Alex from her usual spot. “We live together, we sleep together, we share a home and a life and a marriage, but we don’t  _ talk _ .  The longest conversation we’ve had in the last six months was about hiring a new landscaping service.”

“How often do you try?”

Alex pulls to a stop, exhaling sharply and turning to face Marie with her hands on her hips.  “What?”

“Try to talk about something besides landscaping, or work, or what’s for dinner?”

Alex inhales slowly.  “I don’t know.”


	4. Chapter 4

“I have to go to Atlanta tomorrow,” Alex says over dinner.  She parses through the collection of leafy greens on her plate, discarding a piece of arugula to the other side of the salmon.  She hates arugula.  “CDC meeting.”

“When will you be back?” Lucy sits at the other end of the oversized table, cutting into her fish delicately.

“In the evening.  Got the 3:00 back to Laguardia.”

“Okay,” Lucy says.  She pops a piece of salmon into her mouth.  James had handed her the newest assignment as she left the office earlier that day, a kill order out of the city that will have her home late.  “I have a late meeting uptown, do you think you can handle dinner?”

“Sure,” Alex mutters, scraping another piece of arugula over past her own salmon.

 

* * *

Lucy breezes into the office the next morning with a briefing packet in hand and a plan forming in her mind.  James got a dune buggy recently and she’s been dying to try it out.  “Get me James, I’m borrowing his toys.”

“Yes ma’am.”

She glances through the briefing once more.  She can finish this up, get back to the office, shower, and be home by 7:30, definitely.

 

* * *

“What am I doing with all of these?” Alex says, staring down at the table full of explosives. 

“New job, new toys?” Winn offers.  Kara rolls her eyes and punches his arm.

“Cartel lieutenant,” she says, handing Alex a folder.  “Doesn’t surface often but we have a location on him for an hour today.”

“And I’m using motion sensors and C4 to blow him up?”

“Yep!” Winn says cheerfully.  “Bad guy go boom, and we all get to watch the fireworks.”

“And by ‘we all get to watch’ you mean—“

“That I will be watching from here,” Winn says, sighing.  “While you get to go off and have all the fun.”

“Exactly.”  Alex fiddles with one of the detonation sensors.  “Load it up, then.”

 

* * *

James’ dune buggy comes with a rocket launcher, of all things, and Lucy grins at it and pats him on the cheek.  “I’ll try to bring it back in one piece, buddy.”  

“Jerk,” he mutters.

She pulls her goggles on and cranks up the engine and the stereo and pumps the gas twice just to see him wince before she speeds away.  She’s got fifteen minutes to make it to her kill box and this mix has exactly fourteen minutes and 26 seconds worth of obnoxious, perfect eighties rock songs.

It takes barely ten minutes taking the fun way around, and she skids to a stop in a cloud of dust and blaring music.  She kicks up more dirt as she leaps out of the buggy and dances around a series of basketball-sized rocks, ending with a pirouette and a final definitive hop, landing in tandem with the last note in the song.  She’s never giving this thing back to James.  

She pushes the goggles up over her forehead and squints into the distance.  There’s a dust cloud two miles out, the only disruption on the horizon.  It has to be the caravan she’s waiting for.  Lucy yanks the rocket launcher out of the buggy and hefts it up onto her shoulder.  

“Jesus,” she mumbles, wiggling her shoulder under the weight.  It has to weigh nearly as much as she does.  

Two minutes out.  Lucy shuffles over to a boulder that will serve as a nice platform and is blasted back with a shot to the chest.

“What the fuck,” she gasps out, blinking up at the sky from her spot laying on the dirt.  Her entire torso feels like she got hit by a bus, the round powerful enough to send her flying from the impact to the vest even from distance.  A series of explosions go off all around her, and Lucy yanks herself into a ball around her bruised chest.

She scrambles over to the dropped rocket launcher and hauls it up onto her shoulder, swinging around to the direction the shot had come from.  There’s what might have once been a shed sitting on top of a ridge a kilometer away, and she pauses, aims, fires.  

The building and half of the ridge disappear into the ensuing explosion.  Lucy gapes at it, then at the rocket launcher, for a long second.

“Damn, Jimmy,” she mutters at the rocket launcher.

The caravan is gone, disappearing out of range into the desert.  Lucy grumbles out another curse and drops the rocket launcher into the dune buggy, spinning the wheels on her way over towards where someone had so rudely fired at her from.  The crater that had once been a building is covered in smoke and debris and the remnants of a laptop.  

Her phone rings.  It’s her boss.

“Fuck me,” she says with a sigh.

 

* * *

“Alex, can you please--” Winn hurries after her, suture kit in hand and half of the gash on her shoulder stitched up.

“Alex!” Kara snaps, planting herself in Alex’s path and glaring until she stops.  “Let him--”

“I need all of the--”

“Surveillance data, I know,” Kara says.  “We’re pulling it.  Now sit down and let him stitch you up.”

Alex huffs out a sigh but sits anyways, glaring up at Kara.  “Do we know--”

“We know nothing,” Kara says sharply.  “Not yet.  But we’ll figure it out once IT pulls the satellite imagery down, which will take an hour at least, so get stitched up and then go take a shower.  You smell like explosives and dirt and it’s gross.”

“You’re gross,” Alex mutters.

“What is this, the fourth grade?” Winn says.  He freezes when Alex glares up at him.

“Don’t think that because you have a needle in my shoulder right now that I can’t kill you in at least fourteen different ways using my index finger,” she says with a pleasant smile.

“Yes ma’am,” he squeaks out. 

“Drink this and be nice,” Kara says, rolling her eyes and pushing a bottle of whiskey into Alex’s hands.

Alex takes a long swig, glaring at Kara the whole time.  She stands as soon as Winn finishes stitching her shoulder and disappears into the locker room.  By the time she’s showered and dressed, the surveillance footage is downloaded to her laptop.  She flops down at her desk with a cup of coffee and pulls up the footage.

The dune buggy crashes into her kill zone, disrupting the motion sensors and kicking up dust.  Alex glares at the monitor and the figure the leaps out of the dune buggy, dancing across the landscape and--

“Shit,” Alex breathes out, rewinding and watching it again.  That spin, that flick of the hips, that jaunty landing.  She knows those movements, those hips, that body.  “ _ Shit _ .”

 

* * *

“What is this?”

Ainsley the Hot Tech Girl snaps her gum and glares distastefully at the laptop carcass Lucy’s just settled delicately on her desk.  She squints and pokes at a corner with one finger, and another piece of broken plastic snaps off the casing.

“Present for you,” Lucy says with a grin.  The  _ Q _ key falls off and flops onto the tabletop.  

“But what is it?”

“Once upon a time, it was a young laptop with hopes and dreams,” Lucy says with a shrug.  “Then it did drugs and now it’s a burnout.  So tragic.”

“You bring me the nicest things,” Ainsley drawls.  

“Can you recover anything?”

Ainsley raises an eyebrow and wedges the edge of a screwdriver into a crack, prying the casing off and letting it fall to the floor so she can inspect the circuity.  “Did you shoot it into space?”

“More or less,” Lucy says cheerfully as Ainsley connects a few wires and starts tapping away at her keyboard.

“Looks like just about everything is degraded or destroyed,” Ainsley says, shrugging.  “Got an address for you, though.”  She scrawls out an address on a Post-It, adding a heart and blowing a kiss as she hands it to Lucy.

“You know I love you, Ains,” Lucy says, winking and snapping the Post-It up from Ainsley’s hand.  “See you later, nerd.”

She doesn’t look at the address until she’s out of the building, glancing down at the scribbled address and slowing in the middle of the sidewalk as she does.  A college student nearly barrels into her.  

Lucy blinks down at the address, staring stupidly at it.  She knows that address, that cross street, that building in midtown near the Waldorf that holds a certain well-funded non-profit run by a bleeding heart bioengineer with a trust fund.

“Fuck me,” Lucy says loudly.  The college student who had barely dodged running into her slams to a halt and turns to face her with wide eyes.  “Not you, Poindexter, keep moving,” she snaps, shoving him out of the way and hailing a taxi.  

“ _ Fuck _ ,” she mutters, directing the cab driver to 51st and Park and her wife’s office.


End file.
